Valentina Dagiene is a professor and principal researcher at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She acquired a PhD in mathematics/informatics in 1993 and habitation procedure in education in 2005. She has published over 300 research papers and 60 textbooks. Her research interests include informatics education, contests, and olympiads, the development of informatics curricula, computational thinking, technology enhanced learning, teacher education and digital competence, the development of education tools, and software localization. She is an editor of two international journals, “Informatics in Education“ and “Olympiads in Informatics” (indexed by Scopus, WOS emerging list). She has coordinated over 50 national and international projects on informatics, programming, and STEM education. She is acknowledged by an honorary gold medal for contributions to school Informatics in Europe (ETH Zurich, 2011), the Informatics Europe Best Practices in Education Award (2015), the Ada Lovelace Computing Excellence Award (2016), and the Cross of the Knight of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas (2016).